Zeus, Dog of Chaos Read online

  Pet? I am no mere pet. This person obviously doesn’t see my Vest of Importance. I shift so he can see my rank.

  “Not exactly,” Madden’s mother says, at the same time Madden says, “Yes.”

  Yes? I harrumph. A pet! Madden is . . . maddening. Now I see where he gets his tag.

  “Not exactly?” The man in the small house cocks his head and hands the plastic card back to her.

  The lieutenant leans her elbow over the window. “I haven’t had a dog in years, Jared. We’ll see how this one works out. They’re amazing, what they can do. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. But I just like knowing I can pick up and go if I have to, you know?”

  Jared smiles. “Military mind and a wandering heart.”

  The lieutenant nods curtly. “You know it.” The man salutes, and the lieutenant salutes in return.

  We drive down a road where all the houses look the same. Same, same, same. I don’t rely on my sight much to guide me (eyes are the best liars, after all), but I hope our house smells different enough from these others so I can navigate around here. Right now, this is a muddle of sameness. It’s like that time a volunteer took me into the Maze of Mirrors at the county fair while I was still training. I’ve never been so dizzy, seeing all those glass Zeuses! I remember whining a lot.

  I should maybe whine now.

  But I shouldn’t have worried. We turn into a driveway, and our house smells crisp and sharp, like bleach. So harsh it burns my nostrils a bit, and I sneeze.

  “This is it, Zeus,” Madden says, tapping his leg. I am proud of him, knowing right away how to communicate the command come with hand signals. Even though he thinks I’m a pet. I’ll train him. “Come on.”

  I leap from the truck and land—brrrr!—on a patch of ice, cold and slickery. I skid, slide, and fall into a prickle bush.

  Madden chuckles but asks, “You okay, bud?”

  I huff. My breath comes out in an icy puff.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  I follow Madden into the house. I haven’t been in a lot of houses, because I’ve been mainly living in a prison with Dave, but this one feels more like my veterinarian’s office than a place to live. There are no soft cushes on the floor, no colorful things on the wall. The furniture is small and hard and plastic and reminds me of pebbles stuck to my paw. The house is hollow, and it echoes. Echoes make a heart feel lonely.

  We trot up the stairs, my toenails click-click-clicking on the cold, wood floors. When we enter Madden’s room, my heart gasps. He has a huge thing hanging from the middle of his ceiling, with nine floating multi-colored spheres bobbing gently in wide circles, all orbiting a big yellow ball. It reminds me of dogs circling, testing out new relationships by not getting too close, but not ceding any power by backing too far away. It feels . . . familiar, but I can’t label it. And I can’t really explain it, but looking at it makes me feel small.

  And somehow—somehow!—Madden has brought stars inside. They cover his ceiling, twinkling and blinking. They glow greener in here than they do outside, but this boy has captured stars. I believe I’ve under-estimated him.

  Madden plops into a big poof, and it crinkles like a wad of paper. He reaches under his bed, pulls out a box, and swings the lid open. The can he produces opens with a whoosh, and the bubbles fizzing and hissing against the tin can sound like mini firecrackers.

  Should I smell smoke?

  Madden squints at me. I squint back. “Have you ever had a soda, Zeus?”

  I haven’t, but this feels like a challenge somehow, so I respond, Have you ever had mouse guts, Madden?

  And then something wild happens. Humans don’t hear dogs; every dog knows that. Infuriating but true, because we are rather brilliant and pithy, and it would make my job oh so much easier if humans could just hear me with those tiny, ineffective ears of theirs. But Madden laughed just then, when I said that, and for a moment—a sliver of a moment—it was like we had talked.

  Madden pushes himself out of his chair and grabs a paper cup from his bathroom. He returns and pours brown, firecrackery liquid into it. “Here,” he says, placing the fizzy cup in front of me. “Drink up.”

  I sniff it, and bubbles shoot up my nostrils like tiny buzzing gnats. I sneeze. I paw my nose. I rub my face on the carpet. Madden laughs. I squint at him again.

  I slurp the liquid. And oh—oh! It is sweet and syrupy and fizzy and it feels like bumblebees dancing on my tongue, light and airy and bubbly and unpredictable and I sneeze sneeze sneeze and I slurp the whole thing up and then chew on the waxy cup. Oh!

  I can see how this boy captures stars.

  Madden laughs until tears pop out of his eyes. His heart gallops strong and happy. We are joyful and drinking bubbles and capturing stars! Until . . .

  Madden’s door swings open.

  “Madden Phillip Malone. What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?”

  The lieutenant stands in the doorway, fists hammered on hips. “Zeus can’t drink soda! And you! Are you kidding? You know what this does to your blood sugar!”

  This is the smoke I was supposed to smell earlier.

  “It’s diet soda, Mom,” Madden mutters.

  The lieutenant sweeps through the room, gathering up my yummy chewy star-filled bubble cup and Madden’s can of firecrackers. She lifts the edge of the blanket on his bed and finds his box, checks its contents.

  Her questions pop at him like a yanked leash: “When was the last time you checked your blood sugar? Where’s your test kit? Did you check your CGM? What did it say? Did you bolus? How much insulin did you take?”

  Madden mumbles and stumbles across his answers like he’s treading through thick mud, his voice swampy.

  “Speak up, son,” the lieutenant says. She huffs. “Mad, it’s cold out, and you know how much harder your body has to work when it’s cold, right?” Then the lieutenant does this odd thing: she chews on her fingernails. Her fingernails, the absolute best part of a human! This is very odd grooming indeed.

  The air hangs heavy; the orbs overhead sway. Madden’s mom shakes her head.

  “No more people food for Zeus,” the lieutenant says. “He cost too much money to get sick on us. And no more soda, Madden.” She slams his bedroom door—bam!—and stomps away.

  “It’s diet soda!” Madden yells after her. He sighs, and I feel all the weight of the wind behind it. He lifts his chin toward the door. “Let me tell you something, Zeus. My mom? In and out of the country for the last ten years. Deployed all the time. She loves her job more than anything.” He stops there for some reason, letting that phrase, more than anything, snap like a too-short leash.

  “I’ve lived with my grandparents since I was like three years old . . . ,” he continues. He looks at a photo on his desk, of two people in hiking gear standing on top of a mountain. As he does, his heart, which had the scent of a smoky red coal, cools to simmering orange. “They’re my dad’s parents, not hers,” he adds, “so it gets weird.”

  I hear what he’s not saying. Humans do that a lot: not say the things that are actually the most important things. And what Madden not-says is this: My grandparents and my mom don’t belong to each other. They aren’t a pack.

  “Yeah, I lived with them until she got reassigned. Here. The army gave her a crummy desk job.”

  WHOA WHOA WHOA.

  Back up.

  The lieutenant, reassigned?

  Reassigned is the worst of all the words. Every dog knows that.

  I blink at the door she just slammed. Huh. Precise isn’t her label after all. It’s reassigned. Because once you are given that label, it follows you around forever. My forehead crinkles. This is a worrisome new development.

  “She’s got to hate it, her new job. She loves traveling and being gone.” That last word, gone, is as hollow as this house. “Her guilt got the best of her, I guess, so she made me move here, too. She hovers over me, when I’ve been managing by myself since my diagnosis two years ago. Nana and PopPop trusted me to handle thing
s myself, but my mom? Total helicopter. And now she made me get you. I mean, a service dog? Really?”

  Madden reaches over and scratches under my chin. He’s not supposed to do that while I’m wearing my vest. When I’m wearing my vest, I’m working. But, oh, chin scratches feel like sparks of love. Fingernails. I lift my chin higher. I feel guilty as stolen dog treats for enjoying this in my vest, but c’mon! Fingernails!

  “If you were really a pet, I mean, yay! A dog!” Okay, that is a good sign. He knows my true role as a dog of service. “But I don’t need you, Zeus. I don’t need anyone.” At this, he looks at the picture of the hikers again, and his scent changes to a subtle sour smell, like spoiled milk. His words ring of untruth. He needs them.

  The colorful orbs float silently above, in the midst of all those green glowy stars. There’s me at the center, and the circles drawn around me, the new humans who are keeping me barely within their orbit: the lieutenant, who isn’t sure about me because she has a runaway heart and I’m a stay! kind of creature, and Madden, who doesn’t like me because I am the opposite of his independence.

  This mission is going to be rawhide tough.

  ★ 3 ★

  Welcome to Band

  Middle school puts the P-U in puberty. My nose happens to be exactly halfway between tail end and armpit on each one of these kids. It’s the “high-sniff” zone. And there are so many hormones it makes my stomach churn like I’ve eaten too much grass. Hormones smell like a newly tarred road on a hot summer day: growth but not yet grown.

  The hallways are wide and cold, and the floors are so shiny slick I have to tread lightly, like I’m slipping over an icy puddle. This building looks a lot like Dave’s prison, but with boxes instead of bars.

  Hundreds of metal boxes line the halls. Madden keeps his eyes lowered, a submissive stance in dog language. I mirror it as much as I can, but kids keep swooping in front of me, causing me to skid into them.

  Madden’s skin is warm but painful, like a sunburn. Embarrassment. Why does his confidence smell as gritty and dry as cat litter?

  “Dude, you get to bring your dog to school?”

  “Lucky!”

  “Can I pet him?”

  Madden is supposed to say no, of course. I’m a service animal. I am wearing my vest. I am supposed to receive no attention while on the job. But Madden = maddening. So he says, “Yeah, sure. He loves chin scratches.”

  But I don’t—

  Zing zap zam!

  Oh. Yeah. Chin scratches!

  It feels so guilty good, my back leg thumps against the cold slick floor—thumpthumpthump. The kids laugh like shiny jewel-toned June bugs and I have to remind myself how undignified this is, but chin scratches.

  We finally manage to weave and slip through the crowd, and I can hear the windy whispers all around us:

  “He has diabetes.”

  “Does he have seizures?”

  “Nope, wrong sickness, stupid.”

  “You can have seizures with diabetes.”

  “I want to bring my dog to school. No fair.”

  “Yeah, well, he has to stick himself with needles all the time. You want to be a pincushion like him? Then you can bring your dog, too.”

  “Ew, no. Needles are the worst.”

  “I know, right?”

  More kids pack the hallway, and it’s so tight and stuffy and hot and loud and hormoney. My head spins. The students bang open and close the metal doors—I hear someone call it a locker—and the clatter reminds me of the time that a training volunteer took me to the bank to drop off coins collected at a Canine College fund-raiser. The lady at the bank poured the coins into this huge machine, and clank-clang-clunk, the coins got sorted.

  Middle school hallways feel like living inside that clank-clang-clunk machine.

  Suddenly, a feather of a girl floats in front of us. She has an ice-cream cone on her shirt and she has a long rainbow winding around her neck and she is shiny and golden in every way except she wears cat ears on her headband. If I squint, I can pretend they’re dog ears.

  “Hi, Madden!” she sings. She sings. Her voice is like a bluebird’s, and it makes my tail wag, and I can’t believe how quickly I’ve become so undignified. I snap to attention.

  Madden’s heart picks up a skippier beat, and the heat rising off his skin changes from sunburn red to soft and glowy, like skin warmed beside a fire. “Hi, Ashvi.”

  “Is this a service dog?”

  “Yes.”

  Well, muzzle me. Madden tells the truth sometimes.

  Ashvi stoops to look at me. Her eyes are like bronze pennies, and I love her so much it makes my toe pads tingle. But here’s the thing: she doesn’t pet me. She respects my duty. “What’s your name, bud?”

  Zeus. I love you.

  “This is Zeus.”

  Ashvi smiles, and beams of sunlight bounce around her. “Zeus. The God of Chaos.”

  Chaos? Chaos is the opposite of order. Chaos isn’t my label.

  But Madden chuckles like that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. His laugh is too plastic. He should be more subtle. He should just tell her he loves her.

  Ashvi stands and smiles at Madden, and Madden’s insides melt all over the floor. I know I’m the only one who notices, though, because Ashvi walks right through Madden’s entrails and places her hand on his arm.

  “My granddad had a service dog. I don’t know what you need him for, but Zeus is going to be a huge help.”

  She’s perfect in every way. That’s her word: perfect.

  Ashvi floats down the hall, slinging her rainbow wrap over her shoulder, trailing comets in her wake.

  Madden sighs and slips into a trance. A happy trance like the smell of sizzling bacon grease, not a dangerous one that requires an alert from me. Definitely not subtle.

  Then, a terrible, horrible screeching sound blasts through the air, so awful it makes the hair on my back hackle. I growl, get into fight stance. The sound is low, grinding, and it surely signals the end of the world. The pupils bounce off the walls and each other, swarming into rooms. Lockers clang like coins one last time, and Madden wakes up from his fuzziness and snaps tight like a rubber band.

  “Crap, that’s the late bell. C’mon, Z!”

  I escort Madden to a series of classes:

  Science. Or as I think it should be called, the Study of Stuff. Madden and I weave through a maze of desks to get to his seat. I step gingerly over a lot of things and I bump into many of them, and the students laugh. Madden burns like the smell of scorched popcorn.

  Math. Number Pushing. Madden and I enter the room, and a wall of squeals and whispers washes over us. Madden shifts in his skin like he has fleas.

  NOISE BREAK! In prison, cafeterias were for food. In middle school, it is where noise is made, plus a bit of smelly chow. After he eats, Madden discreetly presses a button on a black plastic device attached to his belly, and the sweetness of his blood disappears behind chemicals. I hide under a long, squeaky table the whole time, because many kids point at me when I enter, and this makes Madden clench his face like a fist.

  Next, Madden brings me out, to a courtyard surrounded on three sides by the school. He removes my vest and commands me to relieve myself. It is difficult, going to the bathroom with so few moments between those horrible “bells.” Not to mention this whole courtyard has a fine, misty cloud hanging over it that reeks of scents that can only be called, I now know, middle school. Then the classes continue:

  Social Studies. Dead People Who Did Things. Many pupils reach out their fingers to pet me as I pass, and I get all jittery and distracted. Based on the scowl Madden wears, he feels the same.

  Next, Madden goes into a restroom. He looks at the machine attached to his arm, then he—snap!—staples the side of his finger, and the sound echoes around the room. Another kid pushes out of a stall and scowls at the sight of Madden’s blood, smirks at the sight of me. Madden wipes a drop of blood on a piece of paper, then swipes his finger on his jeans. He compares
the two screens and nods. “Blood sugar good,” he whispers to me. I’m confused. I know, I say. I would’ve told you if it was off. A bell screams, and Madden and I obey and run.

  Oh, now I get it! Bells are a command! That makes their terrifying shrieks slightly more tolerable.

  Next, Language Arts, or the Glorious Study of Labels. Everything in this class is labeled, even the labels themselves! Labels have labels like noun, verb, adjective. I’m going to learn quite a bit in this class. I’m going to learn how to label people better! I sneeze-sneezesneeze with joy when I realize how much fun all this labeling is going to be. The other kids laugh. Madden goes boneless and slumps into his seat.

  Today in the Glorious Study of Labels, the students read a poem:

  so much depends

  upon

  a red wheel

  barrow

  glazed with rain

  water

  beside the white

  chickens

  Do I understand this poem? No. Does it make my teeth itch, wanting to barkbarkbark and chase those darned white chickens all over the farmyard? Yes.

  And then, after an unending number of those horrid shrieking commands called bells, we walk to a room at the end of a long hall. Madden ditches his too-heavy backpack on a shelf, and before we even walk through the door, his face brightens, his steps become springier, his heart peps. He swings open the double-wide door and whispers down to me, “Zeus, welcome to Band.”

  ★ 4 ★

  Music Must Be Destroyed

  Instrument:

  In. To be contained; the opposite of out. (I prefer out.)

  Strew. To cover or scatter.

  Mint. Red, zippy round candies.

  As best I can tell, an instrument scatters musical notes and not candy, as its label implies. Why am I never given the candy I am promised? When we walk inside the band room, the air is filled with a confetti cloud of notes, flitting and honking and pounding and plinking all about. A confusing whirlwind of sound. I blink. I pant.